We’re back to recommendations from Jo Walton here and it’ll be one of the rare books I read that aren’t science-fiction or fantasy. It’s also really old, being first published in 1935 and apparently is still in print. It’s actually the tenth book in a series of detective novels that mostly feature Lord Peter Wimsey as the main character. But as the foreword here notes most of these books are fairly standard staples of the genre and it isn’t until this book that the author Dorothy Sayers reached for something more.
This was directed by Debra Granik who we know from Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout vehicle Winter’s Bone. This work is recognizably similar in its reverence for the wilderness and sympathy for neglected communities in the US. Unfortunately while the lead actress Thomasin McKenzie turns in a very strong performance, this film is ultimately too soft edged to be anywhere near as good as the earlier film.
Here we have another modern Russian film and for once it isn’t one by Andrey Zvyagintsev. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa, this one is as visually different as you can get from Zvyagintsev’s style due to its warm, rich and bright color palette. But don’t be mistaken, as we have come to expect from the tortured Russian psyche, this is just as searing and incisive a critique of contemporary Russian society as anything in Zvyagintsev’s oeuvre.
I worked a long time on this scene, even accounting for the fact that it reuses the potted plant I’d previously posted. There’s just so much stuff in it, the detailing on the walls for example, plus modelling the chandeliers, working out ways to make the curtains look not horrible. And even after all that time spent, it’s still far, far from perfect. You can view a larger, uncompressed version of the image by clicking this.
This film had some of the shine taken off of it due to sexual misconduct allegations against James Franco. This supposedly caused the film to lose out on many of the awards it was widely expected to win at the time. Still I’ve always been an advocate of separating the artist from the art, even if there is a strange resonance between the events depicted here involving a sex scene starring the main character and Franco’s apparent actions in real life. Franco may or may not be a good person but this is still an amazing film.
So a number of critics drew attention to this as a film to take note of but obviously to international audiences the real draw here is that it stars Iko Uwais who first shot to fame in Gareth Evans’ Merantau and The Raid. This one was written and directed by a different director, Timo Tjahjanto, and Uwais is actually a co-star here but if you come in expecting plenty of gory, visceral violence you won’t be disappointed.
Like everyone else I thought that the Toy Story series was done with the third film which was just about perfect. Trying to tack on anything more to the franchise seems cheap and doomed to failure. Yet after this came out we heard nothing but rave reviews about it and more than a few made particular remarks about its emotional ending. This persuaded my wife and myself to catch it at the cinemas before it has been pushed out by the new Spider-Man film.
